The CIEL Blog

Author: Stephanie Boychuk

  • 5 Ways You Can Help Students Navigate Your Course in VIULearn

    5 Ways You Can Help Students Navigate Your Course in VIULearn

    In 2020, Stephanie Boychuk and the Academic and Career Preparation department conducted a survey of their students to learn more about how course navigation and structure can be used to support student success in online and blended courses. In this blog post, Stephanie summarizes five “quick wins” anyone can use to help students navigate course…

  • Serving VIU Better: Why The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning adopted a Request Tracking System

    In the Beginning The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (the Centre) was a very different place in 2013. During Fall semester, some faculty members at Vancouver Island University (VIU) had begun using VIULearn (D2L) for the first time. VIUBlogs was starting to get more use from faculty members and learners, and VIUTube had…

  • What’s New in VIULearn? (Summer 2016)

    This summer, there have been changes to the names of some of the tools you use in VIULearn. For instance, “Dropbox” for submitting assignments has been creating some confusion with the internet storage service “Dropbox”. Additionally, there have been a variety of improvements to navigation for you and your learners. These changes rolled out on…

  • What’s New in VIULearn this Month? (March-April 2016)

    Every month, VIULearn is updated by our software provider D2L. Most of the time you won’t even notice the changes, because they are behind-the-scenes improvements. An example of a behind-the-scenes improvement was an improvement to the Import / Export / Copy Components tool that allowed bigger courses to be copied faster. Sometimes, there are improvements…

  • Exciting Ways to Use the New “Not” Release Conditions

    You may have seen my previous blog post where I talked briefly about the new “not” release conditions. If you were wondering what these conditions could be used for, I’m here to give you a few ideas to get you started. What Do You Mean by “Not” Release Conditions? Ever since VIU first adopted VIULearn…

  • What’s New in VIULearn this Month? (February-March 2016)

    Every month, VIULearn is updated by our software provider D2L. Most of the time you won’t even notice the changes, because they are behind-the-scenes improvements. An example of a behind-the-scenes improvement was an improvement to the Import / Export / Copy Components tool that allowed bigger courses to be copied faster. Sometimes, there are improvements…

  • Self-Paced Fully-Online VIULearn Orientations for Learners

    VIULearn is a learning management system. Some teaching faculty members use it to upload files for you (like your course syllabus or their PowerPoints), create Discussions or Quizzes, and have you upload assignments or view grades. Some teaching faculty members even run fully-online courses in VIULearn. This means that some of your course activities or…

  • Orientation to VIULearn (D2L) for Students – Spring 2015

    Many courses offered at VIU use our online learning management system, VIULearn. To help prepare you for your course, VIU is offering free orientation workshops to VIULearn. These are available either face-to-face on Nanaimo campus or online for all students. It is not mandatory for you to attend an orientation workshop. During the workshop we will…

  • Global Accessibility Awareness Day – May 15th

    Global Accessibility Awareness Day – May 15th

    May 15th was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As someone who spends a lot of time in online courses personally and professionally, I decided to take advantage of a free webinar entitled “Web Accessibility Tools in Action: Awesome Tools to Build The Web For All” offered by Desire2Learn. Sean Yo (@seanyo or seanyo.ca for more information on…

  • Wiggio: Online Group Collaborative Learning Tool Coming to Desire2Learn

    In March, Desire2Learn acquired the company, Wiggio (http://wiggio.com/). Wiggio creates a product to help students self-organize campus groups. Desire2Learn is working on integrating Wiggio into their Learning Suite, and are aiming to make Wiggio available to all clients in the Fall (although a specific date has not yet been given). So what exactly is Wiggio…

  • Gamification – Article and Infographic

    I came across a couple of interesting (and short) articles on gamification in education today. Although the language makes it seem like gamification is something only the K-12 sector is working on it is becoming a trend in post-secondary as well as job training. In fact, there are over five different seminars on gamification of…

  • Group Restricted Content

    Are you interested in using the Groups tool in to create project discussion areas for students? Perhaps you have readings that only certain students should have access to, or what to release additional information for specific learners needing more support. The Groups tool in D2L will help you organize your course and personalize student learning.…